After a pretty depressing week for the Wings some positive news have occured as the Wings have signed Tom Renny to a 3-year deal as their new assistant coach. Renny will be taking over for Jeff Bashill who was put in charge of the Grand Rapids Griffins after Kurt Fraser left for the Dallas Stars. Renny was most recently with the Edmonton Oilers who didn’t renew his contract after the last season ended.

After a failed youth movement in the coaching staff last season, the Wings have made quite the hire as they managed to ink Renny to a 3-year deal. This is a great deal as the 57-year old provides a lot of experience to the Wings coaching staff.

The Wings posted this statement to their twitter account:

The Red Wings have hired former EDM/NYR/VAN bench boss Tom Renney as an associate coach. Renney, 57, has signed a 3-year deal with the club.

Renney has a career 260-255-9-68 NHL record. BC native won a Mem Cup with Blazers in ’92 and a Silver Medal with Team Canada at ’94 Olympics

I can’t say enough on what a great hire this is. He has plenty of NHL head coaching experiance and this will definatly be important to the youth movement it looks like the Wings are having. He was also in charge of the Oilers 3rd rank PP last season and hopefully can improve the Wings 22nd ranked PP.

“He’s a hard-working guy who has had lots of success in the game,” Wings coach Mike Babcock said. “I couldn’t have found a more experienced guy – that’s just the facts.”

Renny said it was the culture of the organization that brought him to Detroit, per Detroit Red Wings.com:

“When you look at tradition, and certainly in the last couple of decades, there’s only been a handful of teams that can consider themselves the cream of the crop,” said Renney in an exclusive phone interview with DetroitRedWings.com. “As much as no one takes that for granted, the one thing that Detroit has been able to do is sustain a high level of play and excellence and pursue playoff spots and Stanley Cups. In so doing, they have really separated themselves from much of the league in most of the seasons, and who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?”